Publishing an Archeological Excavation Report in a Logicist Workflow

Abstract

The logicist programme, which was initiated in the 1970s by J.C. Gardin, aims: first, to clarify the reasoning processes in the field of archeology; second, to explore new forms of publication, in order to get over the growing imbalance between the flood of publications and our capacities of assimilation. The logicist programme brings out the cognitive structure of archaeological constructs, which establish a bridge between empirical facts, or descriptive propositions, at one end of the argumentation, and interpretative propositions at the other end. This condensation process opens the way for alternative forms of publication, designed to speed up the assimilation of the chain of inference and the consultation of the database on which it stands. In this paper we propose a new publishing workflow respecting the principles of the logicist programme. We show how texts are encoded using XML markup in accordance to Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) recommendations. We explain how the relations between propositions are marked-up as hypertext references with simple qualification. Next, we describe how to extract the overall organization of the interpretation process from the XML tree as RDF triple by extrapolating from relations’ links. We also show how to produce an overview diagram representing the interpretative process.